It’s Alive! The Kindle-izing Journey Continues . . .

After a little over a month, much research and even more angst, Complete Kitten Care is LIVE and available for $2.99 at Kindle. Whew!

While publishing via the DTP (digital text plaform) provided by Amazon works great for text-only (fiction) works, there area number of hoops nonfiction cat-egories must leap. Pun intended. I promised a recap for all my followers, and I promise it’s not nearly as difficult as I made it. So for all you other DWAA and CWA and other nonfiction authors including all my good friends at OWFI, (maybe even some nonfiction Thriller Writers?) here’s how I did it.

1. Create a single document by combining all chapters into one

2. Format with the “style” templates to code your documents for the table of contents. For each chapter heading, I used “Heading 1” and then “Heading 2” and so on for either section heading and/or breakout boxes of text. I found that the software default for HTML codes in the TOC recognized Heading 1, 2 and 3.

3. Remove any tables, boxes of information or other such graphics, as they will not translate. Instead format them with bolded or italicized text, or use Heading 4, 5, 6 etc. These won’t be recognized in the TOC, but the look/format will remain true once translated into HTML. I used this technique to highlight “pull out” information such as sidebars.

3. Insert any photos at low resolution (72 dpi) but as large as possible to be viewable once published in the Kindle. A gif or jpg file works well. Kindle only displays black and white pictures; HOWEVER, if you have color, why not use them? The FREE Kindle-for-PC does display color, and perhaps in the future the handheld will as well. For what it’s worth, I set my page size to A5 (about 6″ x 8.25″) to approximate the view from the smaller Kindle, before sizing my photos. I also placed them between paragraph breaks, which worked well at that size–but not as well if the page is read in larger format or changed to smaller type. I suspect there’s not much to be done in this case although you can set it to “word wrap” which helps a bit.

4. Insert any links you wish. In my bio section, I’ve included my other writing venues as well as my website. Throughout COMPLETE KITTEN CARE, any website mentions for products or resources also have live click-able links. When the books COMPLETE CARE FOR YOUR AGING CAT and COMPLETE CARE FOR YOUR AGING DOG are updated and published, they will include hot links to veterinary resources, and the experts interviewed for the books in the Kindle-For-PC version, and PDF versions if you so desire (but not on the Kindle itself).

5. Click on the “references” tab in Word software, and find the “table of contents” command. There are default choices, or you can build your own. I used the template. It automatically lists, in order, every single word you’ve “coded” with Header 1, 2, and 3, with associated page numbers and clickable bookmarks to that given page.

6. To convert the finished document to HTML, you will SAVE-AS, click on OTHER FORMATS and save as a WEB PAGE, FILTERED. You will lose much of your margins and formatting, but don’t let that scare you. Check throughout for any inadvertent missing paragraph tabs. Remember, this will be translated once more by the Amazon DTP software.

7. If you have any photos in the text, the HTML conversion will create both an HTML text document with ‘placeholder’ spots for images, and a second folder that contains the files of those images. You’ll need to ‘zip’ or compress both of these into a single document. Highlight both files, and then right-click the mouse, SEND TO, and click on compressed (zip) file. THAT is the file you will upload to the Digital Text Platform.

Once you’ve uploaded, be sure to view the test version. This process can be tedious because each page takes a couple of seconds to load. It is well worth checking for formatting errors at this stage, though. If you publish at this stage, and later find errors, you will need to re-publish all over again.

Good luck! I hope this journey helps others. And once again (cuz it’s my blog and I can!), I hope y’all will spread the word about this how-to blog. And if you need good pet care information or know someone who does, please consider my Kindle-ized books.

I’ve just updated my homepage to reflect the new kitten book–along with a new author photo, what fun!